A Report On The Translation Of Food Security, Food Prices And Climate Variability

Agriculture is crucial to prosperity and development of a country.With the increasing development of international communication,agricultural information exchange is deepening and flourishing.Therefore,translating agricultural science and technology texts becomes more important.The source text of the thesis is Food Security,Food Prices and Climate Variability published by the Routledge in 2014,of which the author is the American researcher Molly E.Brown.It is a research on how the weather and climate affect agricultural production,food prices and access to food in food insecure areas by using satellite remote sensing technology.Therefore,it is valuable in solving agricultural problems.Besides,there are few Chinese versions of foreign books on food security,so it is useful to translate this book.This thesis pays attention to information focus of textual function from systemic functional linguistics and focuses on the proper transmission of the information focus by taking an agricultural text as the research object.Whether the information focus is transmitted properly affects the quality of the translation,affects how information focus is presented in the target language,which influences readers to understand key points.Translators can use lexical focusing markers,syntactic focusing markers and textual contrast to identify the focus of the original text and then reconstruct the same information focus in target language,which is very important for the transmission of information focus in agricultural science and technology texts.The lexical focusing markers are divided into exclusive,particular,additive,and negative focusing markers.Syntactic focusing markers in the thesis are cleft-sentences,“there be” structures and passive sentences.Textual contrast means that translators need to determine information foucus under the context of the original text.The thesis gives further discussion of information focus at levels of words,sentences and discourse,in order to emphasize information focus transmission.